Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @11:22AM
from the chip-race dept.

Samsung Electronics just knocked Intel off its perch as the world's biggest chipmaker by revenue, a spot the U.S. company has held since 1992. From a report: On Tuesday, Samsung reported 2017 chip sales of $69 billion, blowing past Intel's $63 billion from last year. The switch underlines how Samsung has transformed itself from a maker of cheap televisions into a pervasive supplier of key components in smartphones and other modern computing devices. It's also a testament to the growth of memory chips, Samsung's main market.

Intel, whose processors are the heart of about 90 percent of the world's computers, didn't have a bad year. Sales grew 6 percent. Success in computers is no longer enough, though. Memory chips, a market Intel only recently got back into, are now crucial parts of smartphones, which easily outsell PCs these days. Memory chips are also finding their way into a range of new devices such as cars. One of the ironies of Samsungâ(TM)s success in memory is that itâ(TM)s a business Intel created in the 1960s.

Sorry, but it is NOT fake news. Clearly you Russians are now infiltrating slashdot.

That Pringles on display in Idaho is not a potato CHIP. It is a potato CRISP. A chip is a slice of a single potato. A crisp is basically mashed up potato molded into whatever shape and size they desire. It's the difference between a boneless chicken breast and a chicken nugget.

Where do you draw the line?PC use to stand for Personal Computer.This would normally mean any computer that is used by a single user at a time.My workstation at work is a personal computer, because it is provisioned for me to work on and no one else.My phone is a personal computer, because I am the only person who should be using it.

The PC is an outdated term, because it was opposed to multi-user computers such as a mainframe where it had one big computer and many terminals hooked up to it.

Snide war comment aside, what is the USA good at? Same thing it's always been good at. Just because some small cheap parts manufacturer is now larger than the world's largest manufacturer of computer chips doesn't mean anything has changed.

Side note, the summary says just making chips for PCs is no longer enough. No longer enough for what? Just what is the major problem with being the worlds largest PC chip manufacturer? It's like saying Ferrari is not good racing car / premium car manufacturer just because

The U.S. still does a lot of manufacturing and output has been growing steadily. The only thing that's changed is we've gotten really efficient at it and as a result employment in that sector has fallen through the floor. If you're buying cheap goods that you'll probably throw away in a few years when they break, they're probably cheaply manufactured in some other country. That's perfectly fine if you just need a cheap blender or vacuum because you don't intend to use it very much. Why pay for premium quality.

On the other hand if you want something that's built to withstand a lot of heavy duty use and likely comes with a 10-year warranty to boot, you're probably buying something manufactured in the U.S. It's just a simple reflection of labor costs. When the cost of some good or service gets lower and lower, the percentage of cost due to human labor becomes a larger part overall. This means that it doesn't make economic sense to manufacture cheap goods in the U.S. when other countries of China can make the same low quality produce at a much lower cost.

I'm far less worried about foreign manufacturing hurting the U.S. and far more worried about government bans into scientific research. Stem cell medical technology is going to be the future of medicine, and U.S. researchers have been barred from conducting research so it's going to be companies in other countries that are making the big advances that will drive the medical field forward. I can see similar issues if Congress decides to panic and ban research into AI due to similar types of fear-mongering over the possible consequences.

The gist of this is correct. However there are plenty of countries outside the USA that are as good if not better than the USA at manufacturing quality goods. Heck even stuff manufactured in China can be as good as anything made in the USA, though admittedly the vast bulk of stuff is not.

Also some "cheap" goods just don't ship well. Apparently for example the vast bulk of your tinsel purchased in the UK is still manufactured in the UK, because stuff shipped via sea from China is rubbish by the time it gets

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:musicmoviesmicrocode (software)high-speed pizza delivery

They're supplying cryptocurrency chips to an unnamed Chinese distributor.TechCrunch [techcrunch.com] Article in Korean paper [thebell.co.kr]
From the Chrome translation of that page...

According to Samsung Electronics and related industries on the 29th, Samsung Electronics completed the process development of semiconductor ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) for bit coin mining last year, and started mass production from January.

People are still using Android 4.x tablets for example, which are NOT getting patched, and have multiple, much worse, known exploits out there.

Me for one, I just can't bear to retire my original Xoom with media dock. It never leaves the local network and doesn't get random apps installed on it now, so security isn't a concern. But apps that don't run on it is a problem. At least, the store still runs. The latest Firefox, chrome and Youtube don't run any more. But Opera does and plays Youtube just fine, keeping this super solid tablet alive as a mobile browser and media screen. Does not go on the road any more. Sigh. This smacks of planned obsolesc

I replaced my perfectly reliable Intel part with a bug ridden AMD part and I couldn't be more happy. Because the early production chip flaw was fixed by RMA and the lockups were tracked down to buggy acpi that could be circumvented. Bugs gone, but the spectacular power performance, cost performance and blessed quietness still remain.

"Intel, whose processors are the heart of about 90 percent of the world's computers..." So all those devices with ARM processors... aren't computers? I'm pretty sure Intel isn't even the most widely used CPU anymore. Everything except desktop PCs has an ARM based CPU now, including billions of embedded devices.

Everybody's talking Intel vs ARM, etc., but TFS clearly says Samsung's major market is not processors, but memory chips (which I assume includes various forms of flash). The market for these things is huge, yet they are essentially commodity components. The volume of proprietary IP in a single Intel processor is vast compared to what Samsung produces. Even Samsung's processors use technology licensed from ARM. I don't think Intel is quaking in its boots just yet. The idea that Korean chaebols are huge, supply the world with manufactured goods, and make a lotta money is not new.